Marine Archeology and Sunken Cities.

For several thousand years people have been looking for the lost city of Atlantis. The ancient accounts record a city of such wealth, power and decadence that the gods destroyed the city by sinking it below the Mediterranean Sea. In fact over 200 city sites have been discovered under that ocean and more abound to reveal greater details as to the nature of the oceanic flooding that drowned those cities.

Site of the stone age city beneath the waters of the British Channel.

A sunken city some ~8000 years old has been undergoing excavated since 2007. The Stone Age site was found to have pristine organic material, acorns, charcoal, wood-worked pieces and extensive finds of human activity. It is the only site of its kind in Britain and is found off the coast of the Isle of Wight , submerged under 35 feet of water. The first thought is that it may have been a land bridge connecting Europe with Britain. Along with flint tools, hearths and ovens the site seems extensive. How it ended up under the ocean is another question, one which no doubt will be explained by earthquake, global warming or subduction zones. Students of the University of South Hampton are involved in the archaeological dig. It is, however, only one of a growing list of human habitations being discovered sunken around the world.

For instance the BBC had a documentary on the world’s oldest underwater Grecian city with graphic 3-D reconstructions of what this Grecian city might have looked like. Only a few meters (28 feet) under the sea off the coast of southern Greece is the drowned city Pavlopetri. First discovered in the 1960’s the site covers 80,000 square meters.

Submarine outline of Pavlopetri.

The site is sufficiently preserved so as to understand the city’s ancient port and docks, paved streets, and a social stratification of building foundations owned by folks of some economic importance such as city officials, scribes, merchants and still standing walls of huge buildings with ancient artifacts that line and litter the seabed. It is uncertain whether the city sank under a single catastrophic event or multiple minor occurrences of some sort, earthquakes possibly (? Hard to believe with the level of preservation!). With courtyards and warehouses and even the remnants of exotic goods, the city might have looked like the reconstructions below.

A 3D reconstruction of Pavlopetri

Cities and other submerged cultures will continue to be found throughout Earth’s history. Whether these were the product of a Noachian flood or not will never be answered by secular scientists committed to materialistic influences like biological evolution and tectonics. It will always be a matter for faith in human methods including their prejudices and bias whether secular or spiritual. You and I will have to look long and hard at the evidence ourselves and decide what it is we read and see. We are free to make these decisions even if we are not experts in every field. Some things are just common sense.

The salinity of the oceans is a strong evidence that they, and the Earth itself, are far younger than the billions of years required for evolution, and is consistent with the biblical age of about 6,000 years.